Many years ago I used to freely, and quite fluently, quickly type out blog articles using my offline word processing application program found on my desktop computer at home. Lately, though, the whole process has deteriorated into a frustrating grind, requiring lengthy revision. I look now at what’s going on with the current president and wonder how bad things will continue toget if i don’t accord it a considerable amount of benign neglect. After all, he’s sure to step up immigration enforcement but now I'm concerned thar copters won’r soon be hovering over my street, ready to swoop meup into custody or murder me in th process, without proper due legal process or accountability. Well, with this aggressive brain cancer diagnosis and super-duper oncologist doinglittle-to-no confirmed treatment so far and having no expressed plan, i might even bebetter off just going on about my business while keeping up with appointments and procedures. And i include my daily exercise mileage in the blog, right?10 miles. Time to be relaxed,quiet and still...
Showing posts with label Immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Immigration. Show all posts
Friday, January 23, 2026
Monday, November 19, 2018
Just Finished Reading The Rooster Bar by John Grisham
The Rooster Bar, a 2017 legal fiction novel by John Grisham, examines the world of for-profit schools, in particular law schools. Mark, Todd, Zola, and Gordon are all classmates at seedy Foggy Bottom Law School in Washington, D.C., racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt while soon to receive essentially worthless degrees. In the meantime, their school has done little to prepare them for the bar exam needed for them to legally practice law, so they are looking ahead at a mountain of debt with little-to-no means of paying it back. Gordon, Zola's boyfriend, is the first to crack up, and with his bipolar personality has constructed an elaborate conspiracy theory around a reclusive investor who has gained control over eight for-profit law schools, including Foggy Bottom. His friends try to save him in his crisis, intervening to look for his doctor, but to no avail with a tragic end. Now it is just Mark, Todd, and Zola...she is distracted by the fact that her entire Senegalese family has been arrested and are to be deported back to Africa. After seeing how some lawyers hang around courtrooms and offer their services to different accused parties without their legal credentials ever being called into question, Mark hits upon the idea of winging it as a lawyer and Mark and Zola join him, leaving Foggy Bottom and taking on new identities. The story develops from there as they naively stumble through one foolish mistake after another. With all that is going against them, their situation seems more and more hopeless. Yet...
The last ongoing prime time television series that I followed while it was going on was The Pretender, where Jared, an escapee from a school for specially gifted children, successfully takes on different roles, even once as a surgeon. The Rooster Bar is something like that, although Mark, Todd, and Zola in the end come out looking comically clueless in their endeavors to hoodwink those around them. But they are very sympathetic characters and I (hope to) to see them in another Grisham novel: a sequel is in order here. As for the staggering student loan situation in this country, it is bad enough with the legitimate schools. But these for-profit institutions strike me as legalized con rackets and should be much more tightly regulated and scrutinized...
The last ongoing prime time television series that I followed while it was going on was The Pretender, where Jared, an escapee from a school for specially gifted children, successfully takes on different roles, even once as a surgeon. The Rooster Bar is something like that, although Mark, Todd, and Zola in the end come out looking comically clueless in their endeavors to hoodwink those around them. But they are very sympathetic characters and I (hope to) to see them in another Grisham novel: a sequel is in order here. As for the staggering student loan situation in this country, it is bad enough with the legitimate schools. But these for-profit institutions strike me as legalized con rackets and should be much more tightly regulated and scrutinized...
Monday, August 27, 2018
Just Finished Reading My Ántonia by Willa Cather
Willa Cather is another author that I had never heard of...until I happened to be browsing at my local Books-a-Million store when I came across her 1918 novel My Ántonia. Flipping through it, I saw it dealt with rural pioneer farming life in Nebraska around the turn of the century...not exactly something I was at all familiar with. So I decided to read it and just finished.: here's my reaction...
The way Cather set up the narrative to this story is interesting. The "original" anonymous narrator runs into an old friend, Jim Burden, and together they recall their childhood life in a rural Nebraska town years earlier. The name of a Bohemian immigrant girl named Ántonia gets brought up, and Jack reveals that he is close to finishing writing her story. Later he sends a completed copy, which forms the body of the book, written in the first person from Jim's perspective...
After he was orphaned in Virginia, ten-year-old Jim rides a train west to Nebraska to his grandparents' farm to live with them, accompanied by a farmhand boy named Jake Marpole. The hard work there shapes Jim's character and he grows close to his grandmother and grandfather. Down the road a bit, a new family has just immigrated from Bohemia (the Czech-speaking part of the then-Austria-Hungary Empire) and are living in poor conditions in their shack of a home with poor food...the Burdens set out to meet and help the Shimerda family. Fourteen-year old Ántonia is one of the children, and, like many others in this family, is rather headstrong and proud. But a friendship forms between her and Jim as they learn each other's culture and language. In spite of the book's title, though, the story isn't as much about Ántonia per se as it is about how immigrant families deal with their often very difficult adjustment to a different life in America. Sometimes one of the spouses didn't want to move...the father in this case...and, at least as was the case back then, people with high professional and social standing in the "old country" found themselves either disrespected according to their former position or even placed by others as being "lower class", quite a drop and a problem many had to deal with, along with language barriers. But Jim, his grandparents, and others in the community pitch in to help this family survive and have a more optimistic future after that first dismal (and tragic) winter...
My Ántonia is not exactly what you would call an action thriller, but rather a literary snapshot of an era in our history in which life was tough and people took responsibility for their own lives while pulling together in times of trouble to help each other out. I found it refreshing and liked it...maybe you would, too...
The way Cather set up the narrative to this story is interesting. The "original" anonymous narrator runs into an old friend, Jim Burden, and together they recall their childhood life in a rural Nebraska town years earlier. The name of a Bohemian immigrant girl named Ántonia gets brought up, and Jack reveals that he is close to finishing writing her story. Later he sends a completed copy, which forms the body of the book, written in the first person from Jim's perspective...
After he was orphaned in Virginia, ten-year-old Jim rides a train west to Nebraska to his grandparents' farm to live with them, accompanied by a farmhand boy named Jake Marpole. The hard work there shapes Jim's character and he grows close to his grandmother and grandfather. Down the road a bit, a new family has just immigrated from Bohemia (the Czech-speaking part of the then-Austria-Hungary Empire) and are living in poor conditions in their shack of a home with poor food...the Burdens set out to meet and help the Shimerda family. Fourteen-year old Ántonia is one of the children, and, like many others in this family, is rather headstrong and proud. But a friendship forms between her and Jim as they learn each other's culture and language. In spite of the book's title, though, the story isn't as much about Ántonia per se as it is about how immigrant families deal with their often very difficult adjustment to a different life in America. Sometimes one of the spouses didn't want to move...the father in this case...and, at least as was the case back then, people with high professional and social standing in the "old country" found themselves either disrespected according to their former position or even placed by others as being "lower class", quite a drop and a problem many had to deal with, along with language barriers. But Jim, his grandparents, and others in the community pitch in to help this family survive and have a more optimistic future after that first dismal (and tragic) winter...
My Ántonia is not exactly what you would call an action thriller, but rather a literary snapshot of an era in our history in which life was tough and people took responsibility for their own lives while pulling together in times of trouble to help each other out. I found it refreshing and liked it...maybe you would, too...
Thursday, April 20, 2017
The Tricolor Good Neighbor Sign
The above photo is of a sign I've been seeing quite a lot of lately...one of tolerance, wouldn't you say? By the way, thanks to National Public Radio's website, here's the pertinent article: [link]. There's one of these signs...and I love the green/blue/orange color scheme...posted by a resident two houses down from me, and it seems there is a preponderance of them on the roadside in front of various churches in town...a church seems to be the origin of these signs (read NPR's article). But what are they trying to convey...and why?
The overt message is simple and positive: we're not prejudiced about where you're from...if you're our neighbor, then we accept and welcome you. Sounds good, to me...how about you? The problem I see is that by making the sign into Spanish, English, and Arabic translations, a not-so-subtle political dart is being thrown at the Trump administration...after all, does anyone honestly think that these signs would have come out had Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) been elected as president? Donald Trump had campaigned on protecting our borders from both illegal immigration from the predominantly Spanish-speaking south and from radical Islamists from predominantly Arabic-speaking countries...I think the measures he's taken so far as president are a little over the top but well-intentioned. After all, he is duty-bound to protect us and uphold the laws and I believe he's doing the best he can under the circumstances...I don't have a problem with our president on this particular issue other than the confrontational, stumblebum manner with which he has addressed it...
When President Obama gave his farewell speech just before leaving office, he repeated the oft-said "lesson" about how we are a nation of immigrants, after all. To whom I, as a Democrat who twice voted for him, respond that I'm all for liberal, legal immigration policies...but what about folks just flooding over the border or overstaying their visa provisions? I think that our immigration laws should be enforced...and if people think the laws are wrong, then they can change them through the democratic process! I don't need this condescending, politically correct preaching that typecasts people concerned about terrorism and illegal immigration as intolerant bigots. I'm glad of my neighbors, regardless of their origins...but they should follow the law in becoming my neighbors...
On the other hand, I love it whenever I have a "Rosetta Stone" experience and can see translations of three great languages like Spanish, English, and Arabic. This green, blue, and orange sign that is springing up in so many places has a good basic message which I accept...I just suspect some ulterior political motives behind it all...
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